Mind health

[excerpt from SANE, getting real with reality]

In ancient Rome and Greece ‘aimless wandering’ was considered a form of madness. The ‘treatment’ was stoning and beating.

In mid 1800s America, the label ‘Dysaesthesia Aethiopica’ indicated that black men and women were incapable of living in freedom. The ‘treatment’ was slavery.

In the 1850s and 60s when train travel was becoming possible, it was believed that the shaking motion injured the brain, sending travellers mad. The ‘treatment’ was to s…

[excerpt from HOME, getting real with what you already are]

One evening, I was on my own watching ‘Fleabag’, the series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Fleabag is the main character (we never learn her real name).

Her sister in the programme is called Claire. Married to someone who treats her appallingly, Claire is in love with a Scandinavian man she has met through her work. He is called Klare.

Fleabag and her sister bump into this man in the park. (It’s the ‘I look like a pencil!’ haircut …

[excerpt from FREE, Getting real with life, unlimited].

Sometimes we can seem so utterly confused that it looks like we have no idea of how to move forward. We don’t even know what to do let alone have the freedom to act on it.

A few years ago, I found myself in a state of total overwhelm. My head was in chaos. I couldn’t sleep or really eat. I couldn’t pretend to be my normal self with friends so I avoided company.  I was shaking, exhausted and low. I was looking into the future and all I saw…

[an excerpt from HOME, the return to what you already are]

An ape remembers a tool they need to retrieve an inaccessible reward and heads off in search of it.

A cave man sketches a hunt scene on the stone wall, allowing for the transportation of his learning to another, long after the hunt itself is over.

A scientist designs a rocket that will reach a planet no one has never visited.

Even the amoeba, a single-celled organism, stores memory in protein structures.

All of this made possible by…

My sister and I were in Costa one Sunday (we love a café). We were talking about holidays.

A memory came up of when we were in France in a swimming pool. I was waiting behind someone on the ladder to get out.

At the same time as I pulled myself up the ladder, the woman in front dipped down. Her foot went right down the top of my swimming costume.

In reality, it probably took less than a few seconds for her to extract her foot. In my memory it took so long that it is probably still there. My s…

[an excerpt from SANE which looks at lack, need and greed]

In a conference on building mega brands and mega businesses, years ago, my colleague Nicola Bird asked the only question that mattered: ‘How do we know when to stop? What is enough?’

The seminar leader couldn’t answer.

‘Enough’ was, for that leader, an unexplored concept. And this lack of enquiry, this assumption that the next thing is always, unfailingly necessary and better meant the underlying theme of the conference was actually ‘…

You might have heard of the ‘marshmallow experiment’. The one where researchers give children a marshmallow. The children are told they can eat their marshmallow now or if they can wait until the researcher returns to the room, they will be rewarded with two marshmallows. Follow up with the children, years later, shows that those who display ‘delayed gratification’ are more successful across the board than those who sacrificed the greater reward for immediate pleasure. You might not have heard, …